When Carol Ruth Silver came out on the balcony, it took us a while to figure out who she was because it was so dark. She was a San Francisco city councilwoman who was straight but considered to have solid support in the gay community. She thought she could talk to the crowd and get their attention. Unknown to us, the newly sworn-in Mayor Feinstein and a lot of other important people had been meeting in City Hall that night, and as the riot progressed, they hunkered down in the basement under police guard. They were terrified. I admire Carol Ruth Silver’s guts for coming out on that balcony, but she really didn’t know her constituency. Not only did they refuse to listen to her, they threw rocks and chunks of concrete at her. One of them hit her in the head, and she went back inside.
I remember being fascinated with how these muscular men in leather chaps were ripping parking meters out of the sidewalk. They would being by clustering two or three on either side of the meter, getting a good grip, and then shoving back and forth with all their might. Within seconds, there would be a noticeable wobble of the meter. I remember the rhythmic deep grunts they made as they continued hitting the meter with their bodies on alternate sides. When the meter finally broke free from the pavement, carrying a big cluster ofconcrete roots around the base, they would give an indescribable cheer. There were be no hesitation as two or three of them hoisted the meter up to their shoulders and ran at City Hill with it like a battering ram, at the last minute hurling it up in an impossible arc through one of the big windows high up on the wall. If I had not seen it with my own eyes, I would not have thought it possible.
Video footage (fragmentary) of the White Night Riot. From YouTube, copied from www.shapingsf.org, shared under the following Creative Commons licensing: Creative Commons http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1mMQU1irhk
I don’t know who started torching police cars, or how they did it, although I know I’ve read it since. I remember the one closest to us, in front of the auditorium, going up with a whoosh. I was a little scared it would explode when the flames reached the gas tank, but none of us moved away. As they burned, their sirens would go off and shriek insanely like someone dying until finally the voice of it was burned out. Eleven squad cars bit the dust that night. For weeks afterward, we’d see three cops to a patrol car instead of the usual one or two.
(White Night Riot protesters burned police cars in front of City Hall, San Francisco; SF Chronicle photo by John Storey, 1979)This was a sound impulse. A lot of women who were attacked by cops after leaving the riot were run down against building walls by cops on motorbikes. However, I quickly realized the focus of this squad was on the crowd in front of City Hall. They sat there, talking among themselves, apparently waiting for a signal before charging into the unsuspecting masses in front of them. I could feel their hatred as if it were a change in temperature. They all had on helmets with visors and protective vests, and wore black billy clubs.
We began whispering frantically to each other. Our friends were in that crowd, and we had to warn them--but if we went after them, we could get run down ourselves. Shouting was out of the question: Not only was the racket around us too loud to allow us to be heard, but drawing attention to ourselves seemed like a really bad idea. My lover was tugging at my arm, insisting we go across the street and into the crowd, and I was frankly too afraid to respond, when we heard another sound.
We turned and looked to our left, down Grove Street toward Van Ness. Creeping forward were literally dozens of dykes and f*ggots on the big motorcycles they rode in every Freedom Day Parade. Most of these queers were big, especially the women; most of them had on leather. They were a solid unit, and when they got about 10’ from the intersection, they stopped and sat astride their bikes, looking at the cops. Then they all began revving their engines.
I remember being frozen in admiration. My eyes were so full of those brave queers, I don’t think I looked at how the cops reacted. It seems like the stand-off continued for several minutes. I think Kata had to tell me the cops were turning around and going back the way they had come. I did turn and look then because I could hardly believe it. What I’d like to know is who were those folks protecting the crowd, and how did they get there? I’ve often wondered if I just imagined this whole episode; fortunately, I had companions with me who saw the same thing.
Not long after this, we smelled something we thought might be tear gas, and since two of us had asthma, we left. We walked down Grove to Larkin, turned right on Larkin and went to Market. It looked like streetcars weren’t running on Market, so we went on another block to Mission to get a bus. On the way, a lone woman approached us out of the darkness on Grove and asked if she could walk with us. We had all been holding hands, and we just took her into our line. We caught a bus on Mission and rode it down to 14th. From there, Marcie and I peeled off to go to my house on Brosnan, and the rest went on in the direction of Army. The entire evening, I kept thinking the riot was just going to make people hate us and set us way back in our quest for equal rights. I was heartsick.
Marcie kept calling her mother’s house and getting no answer. Her mother was also a dyke and lived just off Castro Street. Marcie was sure she would have gone to the rally. Marcie was right; her mom, a S/M leather dyke, was on the McAllister Street side of the riot and watched from the edges. We later found out her mother was grabbed by some cops from behind and drug backwards over the broken off stem of a parking meter pole sticking up from the concrete. They didn’t arrest her, just threw her down a block away. She crawled to some gay men who took her to the hospital, where she got a huge number of stitches in her thigh.
At the LAPV meeting the following evening, we talked for hours about what we had seen and what it all meant. We agreed we were the inevitable target of any investigation--no one would believe we had tried to stop the riot, and by this time it wasn’t even a claim we wanted to make. We knew the first attack would come in the form of a grand jury. Enough of us had read Grand Jury Comix and followed the Susan Saxe case to know our greatest threat came if we refused to testify. But there was no way we were going to testify. If you refuse to testify to a grand jury, you do not have the right to claim the fifth amendment. Instead, you are granted immunity (meaning your testimony cannot be used to directly incriminate you) and if you still refuse to testify, you are declared in contempt of the court and thrown into jail. You can be kept in jail without recourse for the length of the grand jury, and if the grand jury reconvenes, you can be sent back to jail over and over again--no trial, no due process of law. It’s an excellent tool of reprisal used in this country against political dissidents.
There were around 30 of us involved in LAPV at that time. We sat in a big living room, most of us on the floor, and someone kept detailed minutes. One by one, we each talked about what we stood to lose personally by going to jail, and what we’d like to have done for us by the rest to keep our lives intact until the boys gave up and let us out of jail. Two of us were parents; after a long discussion, it was agreed that if, at all possible, we two would avoid grand jury summons, leaving town if necessary. Women talked about their jobs, their pets, their leases, their houseplants, and their bills. At every turn, one or more of us volunteered to cover for her if she was jailed, with no time limit. By the end of the night, we had a solid contingency plan, a sworn commitment to never break silence, and enough resources to cover the jailing of several (though not all) of us. I don’t know what would have happened to us if we had been sorely tried, but I remember believing every woman in the group with all my heart, and feeling ready to go down fighting for any one of us.
Most of the women in LAPV had known each other first in either Lesbian Schoolworkers or the No on 6 Campaign. Some of them had known each other even before that. I joined Lesbian Schoolworkers as soon as I arrived in the Bay Area in 1978; I also joined Lesbians Under 21 (I was 22, but my lover was 17) and attended a few Prairie Fire meetings. The defeat of the Briggs Initiative was a glorious victory, but I wasn’t sure what to do afterwards. In the first week of February, 1979, Sharon brought home a flyer she’d picked up at the Artemis announcing a lesbian community meeting on the 4th at the Women’s Building about a police attack on two dykes as they were leaving Amelia’s the week before. My entire household went, and so did over a hundred other women. Out of that meeting developed LAPV.
LAPV provided my political education. I was one of the least experienced women there, despite some involvement with gay and feminist politics in Texas and my sojourn in a Colorado separatist land collective before moving to San Fran. Many of the other women in LAPV had years of leftie background, some of them going back to civil rights days. More than half of them were Jewish. They had acute race and class consciousness, and if not overtly separatist, at least preferred to work with women only.
They were extremely kind to me. I remember the silence that fell over one meeting when I asked, “Just what are dialectics?”, but after they pushed closed their gaping jaws, a couple of them explained it to me without condescension or hurry. We all read The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove together, a history of police repression in America, and we used Constructive Criticism by Gracie Lyons to run our meetings. My Jewish sisters also shared their heritage with us in an open-handed and noncritical way, and made a devoted ally of me for life.
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